Andrew Mills/The Star-LedgerHolocaust survivor Ilsa Loeb, left, describes the ordeal she endured as survivors of the holocaust and members of their families speak to students at Samsel Upper Elementary School in Sayreville.

SAYREVILLE — The two elderly Jewish women told of when they were girls in Europe, just a year or so older than the fifth-graders who were listening intently to them.

But their childhoods were nothing like those of their audience. The women told their first-person accounts of living in fear, of hiding for years, and of surviving while others did not. It was the history of the Holocaust coming to life last week for about 90 fifth-graders at the Samsel Upper Elementary School in Sayreville.

The students, 10 and 11 years old, are studying the Holocaust, during which Nazis exterminated 10 million people, including 6 million Jews.

"The survivors personalized it," said Adele Goldenberg, the fifth-grade teacher — and a child of a survivor herself — who organized the event Wednesday afternoon. "They (the students) grasped a lot. Its a very difficult concept."

The speakers — Ilse Loeb, a native Austrian now living in Monroe, and Devorah Hilsen-Rath, a native Hungarian now living in Highland Park — survived the Holocaust in different ways.

Loeb was hidden by a Christian family in the Netherlands, while Hilsen-Rath lived through Auschwitz, located in Poland and the Nazis’ largest death camp, and a slave-labor camp in Germany. They spoke in different classrooms to different groups of children.

Loeb told the children, "I’m making you all a witness. When you get older and go to college and then have children and someone says to you, ‘the Holocaust didn’t happen,’ you can speak out."

Then she related her story — how she was 13 years old in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Germany. Her parents, fearing the worst, packed her onto a train from their home in Vienna and sent her to live with a cousin in Holland. Loeb never saw her parents again.

Andrew Mills/The Star-LedgerDevorah Hilsenrath of Highland Park tells students about her experience at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. She and other holocaust survivors and their famliy members visited with students at Samsel Upper Elementary School in Sayreville.

Once in Holland, her life initially was similar to that of Anne Frank, the 13-year-old Dutch girl whose famous diary recounted two years of hiding from the Nazis with family and friends. But unlike Anne Frank, who was captured and died in a concentration camp at 15, Loeb survived.

For two years, Loeb lived with her cousin and was able to stay in contact with her parents. But in 1940, the Germans occupied Holland and she received a letter from German authorities to report to a train station for shipment to a labor camp. Her hosts convinced her to hide instead. She became a Dutch girl with new identity papers supplied by the Dutch underground. She lived with her cousin, and then with a Christian family who helped save 32 Jewish children from the Nazis, until May 1945 when Germany surrendered.

The war changed Devorah Hilsen-Rath’s life when she was 12. She was living with her family in a village in Hungary when the Nazis took over her country — and her whole family was sent to the camps.

Her detailed account of life in Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people died, captivated the students. They hung on her every word, their faces expressing horror.

Hilsen-Rath said she and her cousin, who was with her in the camp and later transferred with her to a slave camp in Germany, escaped and hid first in an air-raid bunker and then an abandoned farmhouse in April 1945. Within days, the Russians overran that part of Germany and the girls were freed.

Hilsen-Rath, now living in Highland Park, told how she and her cousin went back home, hoping to find their families.

"That’s what kept me going in the concentration camps," she said. "That I would be reunited with my family."

"It made me have goose bumps," 11-year-old Stephanie Deocampo said of Hilsen-Rath’s story. "I felt, how could somebody (the Nazis) do that. It made me really upset, especially when the families were separated."

Jonathan Lomeoi, 11, listened to Loeb’s story.

"I was very, very impressed," he said. "I felt very, very sorry for her. Most of her family died. If I were there, I would switch bodies with Ilse so I would go through it, not her."

Goldenberg said it was the first year that the Holocaust studies were being taught to fifth-graders at Samsel. But, she said, it won’t be the last, and she will help devise a curriculum on the subject this summer for the school.
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